Escaping the Walled Garden: Growing the Mobile Web with Open Standards

Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be here today. I must say I
cannot claim to be an expert in the mobile phone technology, so I speak as a
guest in this conference. My career for the last 20 years has unrolled in the
context of the Internet. What I find exciting about being here now is that we
are at an epic point in telecommunications history, when the mobile platforms
discussed here, and the Internet platforms which have enabled such a
spectacular growth and innovation, are poised, if we manage this well, to
merge.

In the few minutes we have together, I would like to explain to you the
essence of an open Web platform — the things without which it would not
deserve the name. I would like you to understand that there are plenty of
ways in which we could fail to pull this off, and leave ourselves
incapacitated, with innovation stifled. By 'we' here I mean the whole
community of manufacturers, service providers, content providers, consumers,
and to a limited extent, legislators. I'd like you also to feel with me the
excitement about some of the incredible things we can aim for if we
succeed.

Let me tell you where I am coming from, to help you understand my point of
view. Twenty years ago, or 52 Web years as we used to say, I was a software
engineer at CERN, the particle physics lab in Geneva. CERN is a great place,
full of people from across the world tackling the greatest current challenges
in physics. It is a great place to work, with lots of very creative people
who chat over coffee with views of the vineyards and the Alps.

Now, this diversity of talent had brought with it a diversity of
technology. This is pre-Web. Take your minds back — perhaps, younger
ones, ask your parents. There are documents stored on computers —
papers, manuals, help systems, letters, but each system works on one
particular computer — minicomputer, mainframe or PC or Mac in those
days — and runs on one particular operating system, VMS, VM-CMS, DOS,
Mac OS, and many flavors of Unix. So finding a document involved finding out
which computer it was on, knowing which program to run, and learning how to
use that program. This was driving me crazy, and by 1989 I'd figured out that
a networked hypertext system, a kind of Web, could be used to wrap up each
system and make its screens, menus and documents be part of a globally
interconnected space which could be viewed from any computer.

Also, just at that point, a critical transition was occurring. Each
computer had been connected to a different form of network: Decnet, Cernnet,
Bitnet, Appletalk, and so on. The attempts to rationalize these using ISO
standards was not doing well. However, the Internet was already connecting
universities all over the US. Depending on who you talked to, it was just
becoming respectable; it was also becoming possible to connect computers to
it at CERN.

I wanted to design the World Wide Web, as I decided to call it, to be
usable for any data on any system. I had watched the failure of so many
sophisticated documentation access systems which constrained their users to
use one type of computer, or operating system. If really anything could be on
the Web, then the Web technology should demand almost nothing of its
users.

The reason that I could just design the Web by myself and set it running
on a couple of computers without asking anyone, was that the Internet in turn
had been designed to be used for anything, constraining its users as little
as possible. So this is one of the qualities of an open platform: it is built
to enable, not to control, and it does not try to second guess the things
which will be built using it.

The Web is designed, in turn, to be universal: to include
anything and anyone. This universality includes an independence of hardware
device and operating system, as I mentioned, and clearly this includes the
mobile platform. It also has to allow links between data from any form of
life, academic, commercial, private or government. It can't censor: it must
allow scribbled ideas and learned journals, and leave it to others to
distinguish these. It has to be independent of language and of culture. It
has to provide as good an access as it can for people with disabilities.

The Web worked because of a number of technical and social reasons. It
worked because there was no central bottleneck for traffic, no central link
database to be kept consistent, no central place to go and register a new
page or a new Web site.

It worked because it was valuable, in a novel way. The value added by the
Web is the unexpected re-use of information. People learned
that if they went to the trouble of putting something on the Web for some
reason, that others would benefit later in ways they never anticipated. The
experience of surfing the Web, which blew some of the early users
away for days and nights, was of discovering things you never knew
existed.

So the Web worked. How many projects do we start which have a bright start
and fizzle out over time? So many that it is worth celebrating that the Web
worked. It is worth noting why. A lot of that has to do with the open
Internet platform.

Let me mention one important aspect of the platform. The serendipitous
re-use of information happens because when I buy an Internet connection, I
don't specify the Web sites I am going to connect to. If you buy an Internet
connection, and you run a Web server, then I can connect to your site. I
don't find my ISP saying that it wants to be my supplier of music, and so it
will block access to any site I try to load music from.

This is of course different from the model which the cable companies have
had. The relatively recent ability of the Internet to carry video promises to
really open up the movie delivery options, and provide an exciting new world
of anything on demand any time, and not just anything we currently get from a
few large companies, but the long tail, the seething mass of
individual and independent films which are waiting to entertain someone out
there. When a US cable company threatens to attempt to stifle this aspect of
the open Internet platform, we have defended it as Net
Neutrality. Net Neutrality was so much of an obvious technical and
social prerequisite of the Internet world, that it never needed a name until
now. It is a tension of convergence, where different business models and
cultures may clash. I am confident that Net Neutrality will be preserved, for
the good of us all. But I would urge you to support it whenever you get the
chance.

So what else does it take to make an open Internet platform?

What does it take?

It takes, mainly, common standards. The innovation of the WWW was possible
because the standards for TCP/IP were already implemented in an interoperable
way all over the planet, in advance of the innovation. TCP/IP wasn't designed
with networked hypertext in mind. But it wasn't designed to prohibit it
either — it was and is an open platform.

Web 2.0 community Web sites, eBay, and Flickr are possible because the Web
standards, in turn, were widely implemented in an interoperable way, before
those innovations. The same for the wikis, like Wikipedia, and blogs, and so
on. The Web is a huge platform for innovation because of those standards. Any
new genre of communication, any new social networking idea, immediately can
gain the value of unexpected re-use by people across the world.

There is a very important difference in attitude between a foundation
technology and — well — let's call it a ceiling
technology. A foundation technology is designed to enable
innovation, to be the base which will support other even more powerful things
to come. A ceiling technology is not. It is designed to provide a value, and
for its provider to cash in and cash out. Proprietary music download systems
are ceiling technologies to the extent that the technologists design to be
also being the only store in town, rather than creating an open market.
Though putting a lid on further innovation, they are still providing a
service, and making sure they profit from it.

Ceiling technologies are the end of the road for innovation.

When you want to make a foundation technology, you need to look ahead. You
need to put aside the short term return on investment questions and look at
the long term.

A great example of this is the patent question. In 1989 my colleagues in
the Internet community would not have dreamed of patenting the ideas in the
Internet protocols. We worked together to figure out new ideas, and implement
them as common standards. As the Web grew, we realised we needed to establish
a structure for developing common Web technical standards. In 1994 we formed
the W3C as a meeting place for this process.

In 1998, we had launched a project to help with the issue of user privacy
on the Web. It was a protocol (P3P) to allow a Web browser to automatically
read and check a machine-readable version of a Web site's privacy policy. It
was not a very exciting new technology, but it was an important innovation as
electronic commerce was being held back in some cases by user fears in this
area. At the time when we should have been engaged in deployment and testing,
a small company announced that everyone who wished to make a P3P
implementation would have to pay royalties. They claimed to have a patent on
something to do with information being communicated and stored and affecting
future communication.

This has a devastating effect. Anyone working for a large company was told
by lawyers never to read anything to do with the work. Anyone working as a
volunteer in their garage dropped their work on these tools as they didn't
want to work for free for this company. The mid-sized companies who were
running a business specifically around the technology ran into serious
trouble. It took us 18 months and $150k to get a legal opinion that royalties
were not in fact payable, but that was 4 Web years, during the boom, and that
was too long. P3P lost its momentum. The world lost an enabling
technology.

How does a company think about standards then if following them may
involve losing that short-term ceiling technology return?

It is a game. In the mathematical sense. Here is the payoff matrix: You
commit to working on a standard, or not. The standard may take off or it may
not.

If you don't commit to the standard, and it doesn't work, (which of course
it won't if no one else does) then life, and your proprietary ceiling
technology, continues. No innovation.

If you do commit to it and it it does work, then a whole new market is
enabled: This is the disruptive case. There is some effort involved moving
the company to the standard, and often to help build the standard. You might
join W3C to help make it happen. A certain amount of effort. There is a major
long term return.

One of the most difficult things for some companies to learn is that this
is not a zero-sum game. We are so used to battling over a fixed market, or
battling over fixed resources, that we tend to assume everything is such that
we can only win what our competitors lose. But when we make a whole new
market space, like the Web, or like GSM actually, then we are in fact
together battling the human condition such as inefficiency, poverty and
ignorance.

Now, what about the corner cases? The fear seems to be of going for the
standard and it not taking off. Well, the loss in this case is the
engineering time to tool up for the standard, which could have been saved.
But it is a very finite loss.

On the other hand, what if you decide not to go for the standard and it
does take off? Everything happens, the new market appears, and you are not
there. The pace of everything ramps up dramatically, and you are left
standing still. The costs of retooling to a standard get much bigger as time
passes. In this conference we all can see the stresses on phone companies,
and we know the dis-empowerment of all travelers from the fact that the GSM
standards and frequencies are not quite global — and we know the
benefits from the fact that are becoming so. Other cases spring to mind. On
the Internet, for example, streaming media are available in many incompatible
formats.

Often this is due to companies wanting to profit from ceiling
technologies. This involves making a high income from the technology itself
rather than letting it take off. This in turn requires patents, and of course
that the owned technology dominates. Hence the battles over VHS and Betamax,
HD DVD and Blu-Ray, and so on.

So as the Web platform and the mobile phone converge — what do we
want the result to be? A foundation or a ceiling technology? Clearly, a
foundation. A mobile phone — or whatever device we carry around which uses
GSM technology and its successors — is going to be everywhere, and everyone
will have one. It has do be designed to be universal. So that everyone can
use it. So that you can do anything with it.

The choice is the new platform being a privately owned walled garden
, or a competitive open platform. Both models can work in the medium
term. But the open model opens up new things which we can only try to imagine.

What are the standards? Basically, the same standards as the current Web
uses. That is the most important point. It is one Web. The Web works on
phones. There are effective browsers which can give you access to the same
information which you could see from any laptop or desktop. Of course,
looking ahead, small devices will get smarter and displays will get more and
more pixels, so mobile devices are taking the same track which larger
computers did a few years before.

That said, there are ways of making a Web site work much better with a
mobile device. The W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) is a group of mobile
technology companies within the World Wide Web Consortium which realize the
importance of this convergence and are working hard to make the Mobile Web a
reality.

MWI defines best practices for authoring content. It defines what sort of
facilities that you should expect to find on a mobile device. It gives best
practices for serving data in the most device-independent way. It recommends
finding out what device you are talking to if you can, and sending
appropriately formatted content. Some phone browsers set out to be able to
provide access to virtually any Web page, but technical limitation on other
phones make this impossible. To encourage Web sites to become easily
browsable by mobile devices, there is a "mobileOK" mark which may be used by
content providers adhering to guidelines.

Designing for the "mobileOK" mark, designing Web sites which are browsable
by many different sorts of devices also has important spin-offs. Many of the
MWI best practices are in fact good Web design principles, so the whole site
will be easier to use for anyone. There is a also a lot of overlap with
accessibility. Making a "mobileOK" site and making one which is easily used
by people with disabilities involves the same sort of work.

From the beginning, The W3C has fought the "best viewed with 800x600
screen" buttons, and any design patterns which disenfranchise different
devices. This was difficult when everyone seemed to have the same sort of
laptop, but easier as it became obvious that screens vary a lot. The Mobile
Web Initiative is the work we have to do now. It is timely, it is part of a
historic convergence of technologies. But it is part of a general strategic
principle of keeping the information which is such a huge form of capital in
the world in as powerful, and reusable from as we can, for the future
generations and people who don't currently have access.

It isn't just about making the Web you know today work on mobile phones.
We are talking about innovation. The innovations which will really count are
the things which I can't imagine now. They may include new applications built
using the familiar AJAX technologies used cross-platform now, well known by
developers, and increasingly available on mobile devices. These new
applications may also operate across multiple devices. This is where we talk
of the Ubiquitous Web. Have you noticed the price of LEDs is coming
down, and more and more surfaces are covered with them? Not just at rock
concerts and Times Square, but coming soon to all kinds of surfaces near you.
Your phone could use these displays, and the abstract task you are doing can
really rise above individual devices. Imagine that my phone or my wristwatch
has details of a flight I am booking, and I walk into a room where it
negotiates to project a map on the wall. And so on. Imagine yourself.
Innovate on the mobile Web platform.

Among other things, many of us are hoping that a low-cost open platform
will have a much greater penetration in what we currently call the developing
world. I personally believe that it is important to humanity to connect
peoples across the world as widely as possible. I think we must preserve the
diversity of cultures and ideas. But also I think we must connect people to
give more global harmony. We should not add connectivity to the long list
that the richer countries have and the poorer ones do not, a list which of
course has clean water, health care and peace pretty near the top.

As part of the Mobile Web Initiative, last year W3C held a workshop on the Mobile Web in
Developing Countries. One of the concerns is that some of the new phones
aimed at the lower cost bracket don't all have Web browsers. The area is very
exciting, and the figures for coverage — 80% of the world's
population I have heard (World Bank, according to Wikipedia), and for market
growth in developing countries seem very positive.

Now, the mobileOk work is bring published. See the front page news on our website.
Not only that, but there is no a checker available which yo can point at your site to
see check some basic guidelines are being met.
This is a completely automaticl checker. It can't, of course,
figure out whether your web site actually makes sense — but it can
look out for signs of the classic mistakes site designers often make
which can be barriers to its use on a mobile device.

So when we look at the choices for the mobile devices, it is clear that
they must continue on the path to an open Web platform. That is what the
Mobile Web Initiative is about. Huge new markets, and huge opportunities for
humanity, depend on this. We know in general how to do it. But there is a lot
to do. It has been my pleasure to take a tour of these issues with you, you
who are the companies and individuals who are making it happen.